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Author’s Note: Of all the happy Christmas!Fic possibilities, I don’t know why I had to do Benihana Christmas, I really don’t. The quote in the summary is a line taken from a Ryan Adams song which is really to blame for all of this, it just go stuck in my head and forced me to write this. On the positive side, it has a cheerful ending and at least it got me writing again because I’ve been sadly uninspired and/or too busy lately. Enjoy :)
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It’s not exactly shaping up to be the best Christmas ever.
Her apartment is festive in a sad sort of way, just some fairy lights and a tree with no presents below it, reminding her that she’s alone, really alone for the first time in longer than she cares to remember. No matter how certain she is that leaving Roy was the right thing, she’s still alone at Christmas and her Mom means well but when she calls three times a week to check that she’s alright it’s just another reminder that this is it, a big test, her first Christmas without him.
It doesn’t help that she keeps finding things at the mall, the perfect gift for a niece or a nephew she no longer has to buy for. It still hurts when Roy passes on a couple of Christmas cards from obscure acquaintances who obviously didn’t hear the news in June.
What’s worse, a thousand times worse, is that it could have been the best Christmas ever. Jim is home, and she knows she loves him now, loves him in a spontaneous parking lot confession kind of way, if she was ever brave enough for that. She isn’t though and he’s home but a million miles away so she smiles a tight-lipped smile when he comes in with Karen and counts the chances she’s missed.
Still, it’s Christmas and she tries because it’s been a big year and she has her own place and her own car and an art class schedule stuck to her fridge. She smiles and wishes on the lopsided plastic star atop her Christmas tree, trying hard not to think about how Jim could have reached up one long arm and straightened it for her.
She goes to work in a determinedly festive outfit, thinking about how that little green teapot meant more than a real ipod and much more than the cheap fake one she tried to smile about on Christmas morning. Everyone in her family has a neatly wrapped gift with a shiny bow. His present is unorganised and messy, a little childish, a little funny, a little bit like them.
“So here’s the gift: you get to decide what his top secret mission is.”
She only wants a hint, because he’s so quiet and she can’t find the man she used to know in the one who came back from Stamford. She just wants to know she didn’t completely tear him apart in May. That maybe, maybe there's still a chance he'll really come home.
“You know what? Um... I really don’t think I should be doing this stuff anymore though.”
He gives her more than a hint, he hands her a flat out refusal to be the man he used to be and it stings more than finding out she wasn’t even worth the price of an ipod to her fiancé of three years. She smiles in a way that Jim, the Jim she used to know, would have immediately recognised as false, and puts the folder away in a drawer. The new Jim merely smiles an equally false smile back and wanders back to his desk.
All day it hovers at the back of her mind, the teapot and the ipod and the best friend she’ll never get back.
It’s the end of the day before things turn around. He’s almost out the door when he stops and turns back to her.
“Oh, you know what? Sorry, I forgot to tell you. I intercepted a transmission earlier and its seems that the CIA is gonna need Dwight down at their headquarters at Langley for training and an ice cream social with the other agents.”
Just like that, everything changes.
She sees that flash of something, a twinkle of mischief and warmth that is the old him, the real him.
He looks at her like he's never looked at Karen and just for a moment he is recognizable as the man she loves.
It’s enough for now, to find the light in his eyes hasn’t completely gone out.
It’s enough for now, to know it’s not too late.
That night she makes a few brightly coloured paper chains and cheers up her Christmas decorations. She leaves the crooked star the way it is. Maybe he can fix it next year.
~
Merry Christmas :)
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